Welcome to the Screen Editor Homepage

Welcome to the home page for Screen Editor, se for short.
se is a screen oriented version of the classic UNIX
text editor ed. It’s similar to vi as both are modal editors with
curses interfaces. However, it differs from vi in that it has the same
command syntax as ed. For example, in se to escape from append mode,
you’d enter a line containing a single period instead of the vi way of
hitting the escape key.

se has a long history
dating back to the early 1980s. Beginning in 2013, Thomas Cort undertook
the task of modernizing the early code and build system to
get the software working on recent POSIX operating systems.
The code base was straight forward and only used facilities available 25 years
prior, and as a result, with a few modifications, it runs on
many modern operating systems. Thomas' primary motivation is to
preserve this bit of computing history. His goals are to squash any remaining
bugs and make se as portable as possible. No major new features will be
added. Inquiries, bug reports, patches, and other correspondance should
be directed to Thomas via e-mail at linuxgeek@gmail.com

Features

command syntax that is very familiar to users who already know ed.

full visual interface allowing you to see the text you’re editing.

built-in help system which describes many of the available commands.

many configurable options which can be loaded from a .serc file.

can be run interactively or in a script via the included scriptse utility.

News

2013-11-26 - Package for OpenBSD available and other updates

Thanks to James Turner, there is now a package for se in
OpenBSD Ports.

Work on se is continuing. I’ve recently been using
scan-build
to identify potential bugs and fixing the code that caused
the warnings. Over the next few months I’ll be working on
documentation and bug fixes. If all goes well, another
release will be made in about 6 months. Feel free to suggest
improvements and contribute patches.

2013-03-24 - Version 3.0.1 Released [Security Fix]

This is a security release. It is
recommended that all users upgrade. The release fixes
insecure handling of .serc files. The new behaviour is
to ignore .serc files that aren’t owned by the euid of
the se process and .serc files that are writable by
other users. No other changes are included in this
release. Thank you to Matthias Kilian of the OpenBSD
project for alerting me to this issue. A write-up about the issue
is available in security advisory
SE-SA-2013-001.

2013-03-24 - public git repository

Just a short note to mention that I’ve set up a git
repository on github for se development. The
URL is as follows: git://github.com/screen-editor/se.git The pretty web
interface is at the following URL: https://github.com/screen-editor/se

2013-03-06 - Version 3.0 Released

It is with great pleasure that I announce the release of se version 3.0.
Many thanks are owed to the original authors of this historic text editor.
There are no functional changes to se in this release, just autotooling
and code modernization. Download se-3.0.tar.gz.